Bill Keitel reads a lot of history. An hour before his last annual shareholder meeting as Qualcomm’s chief financial officer, he reminisced about Qualcomm’s past and how it seems well orchestrated in hindsight: A great idea doggedly pursued, a strategy refined over time, with the end result being a wireless technology giant with $19.1 billion in revenue last year.

But when he was living that history during the past 17 years — 11 of those as the San Diego company’s CFO — the big bets and shifts in strategy appeared anything but sure things.

“When you remember the details, it doesn’t seem so carefully scripted,” he said. “Luckily, we made the right decisions a majority of the time.”

Keitel, 60, will retire on Monday from what he called a 24/7 job. Qualcomm hired George S. Davis, former CFO of Applied Materials, to replace Keitel.

“It’s a bittersweet decision for me,” he said. “Sweet in the respect I want to spend more time with my family, bitter in the fact that this is an unbelievable company.”

Company officials credit Keitel with creating a culture of financial discipline. The company files its detailed quarterly and annual reports with federal regulators on the same day it releases financial results to the public. Some companies issue news releases for earnings before filing official results with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Qualcomm also was among the earliest firms to implement the tougher accounting rules required by the Sarbanes-Oxley financial reform act of 2002.

The moves garnered Qualcomm several awards over the years for its financial reporting.

“He has been a huge part of this management team,” said Paul Jacobs, chairman and chief executive, at the company’s shareholder meeting earlier this week. “He played a critical role in helping to grow Qualcomm. He has done a lot of things to provide transparency to you, to the industry analyst community and also to provide a lot of structure internally to the company.”

Keitel sat down with UT-San Diego to discuss his tenure at Qualcomm and the company’s milestones. Here are some excerpts.

Q: You’re known by Wall Street analysts as a conservative guy. Yet Qualcomm isn’t known as a conservative company.

A: Our philosophy is to be very aggressive in how we pursue the business and compete. I think we should always be very aggressive on that front. But when it comes to managing your cash, managing your accounting and giving projections of where you’re going to be, conservatism and accuracy are what is required.

Q: Was there a big milestone or decision that the company made that might be under the radar for non-insiders?

A: In the late ’90s, we had the Globalstar (satellite phone) business, an infrastructure business, a handset business, licensing and this little semiconductor business.

We had a lot of good discussions and debates about it, but what we ultimately centered on was a belief that with the licensing and chip set businesses, we had an opportunity to bring the value to cell phones that Microsoft and Intel (brought) to personal computers.

We looked at cell phones and thought: This is like PCs pre Microsoft, Intel and Dell. We could potentially bring all this value — lower cost to the consumer, more variety to the consumer and big potential for our shareholders.

That is really the strategy we went on. We sold infrastructure, sold handsets, got out of the Globalstar business and focused on licensing and semiconductors.

Q: How small was the semiconductor business back then?

A: It was very small. I don’t remember the number. One of the big decisions was we took some of the foremost, important engineering resources in Qualcomm that were serving multiple businesses, and we put them into the chip set business. We said this is a big opportunity. You take these engineering resources and put them on this opportunity.

Q: Other milestones?

A: There was the Snapdragon investment. It really centered on our belief that the manufacturers and consumers are going to get a better experience — a more efficient, more economic experience — if the chip set functionally is delivered in an integrated product.

One of the concerns was Qualcomm is going into processors. There were a lot of others in processors. But none of them seemed to be focused on the mobility side, which is what we saw as having big potential.

So we made that bet, and there was a lot of soul searching because we knew it was going to be a big bet, a major investment that we were committing to. Today, thank God we made that bet.

Q: How did Wall Street react to the big investment?

A: Here’s a statistic. Of our major holders today, if you look back 10 or 12 or 14 years, 70 percent of them are the same. They just hold different amounts of Qualcomm stock.

At the onset of a year, if we announce guidance that we’re going to re-up a big investment in research and development, there will be some who will say, “Why are you doing that? Let more of that go to the bottom line. How much risk are you taking?’

But privately, there are a number of investors over the years who have pulled us aside and said, ‘You guys have such a big opportunity ahead. We’re taking the long view of this company. You execute it well. You have a good vision. Go for it.’ So you get different views.

With research and development, much of our R & D takes seven years before we start seeing revenue. There’s a smaller bucket of R & D that takes about three years. So you can’t manage the business thinking I’m going to manage for a certain R & D (level) as a percent of revenue on a one-year or two-year or even three-year basis. You have to run this business with a longer view.

Q: You were recently involved in Qualcomm’s efforts to reform tax policy, in part to repatriate offshore cash. What’s your assessment of those efforts?

A: That doesn’t seem to be front of mind in Washington. There are some strong proponents. But it seems like sequester, gun control, immigration are going to take center stage for the near term.

Having said that, we really need this for our country. Taxes are just a cost of business, and we haven’t updated our tax code for more than 40 years.

I wish everyone in the U.S. in a decision role or even a voting role could understand how competitive the world is. I think if they could see that, and if they could understand the basic economics of that competition, I don’t think this would be a debate.